Philippa Gregory: Virgin Earth

The sailor stood at the open hatch at last. “Come on up!” he called. “Welcome to paradise.”

There was a moment’s hesitation and then a rush up the narrow wooden steps, and the first emigrants stepped out on deck and J followed.

It was evening. The skies were a color that J had never seen before, the palest of mauves lying in stripes like gauze over the enormous river that reflected the colors up in pink and blue and purple. The river was still, like a tarnished silver mirror, and as J watched it went suddenly dark and stirred and then went still again as an immense shoal of fish swooped by. It was a stretch of water greater than J had ever seen, except for the sea itself. Only dimly behind the ship could he see the distant southern bank as a dark shadow of trees. All around him was the smooth sheen of river water, and as he looked inland, away from the sea, it seemed to him that it went on forever, flowing as wide forever, making no compromise with narrowing banks, impossibly wide, impossibly rich, impossibly beautiful.

J looked toward the shore. The emigrants were disembarking in haste; already a chain had been formed, tossing their goods down the line to land with a careless thump on the dockside. Half of Jamestown had turned out to greet the ship; there were shouted enquiries for news of England, demands of the captain for commissions completed, bills paid, and then coming through them all was the governor, Sir John Harvey, grandly shabby in an old coat spruced up for the occasion with worn gold lace, moving through the colonists with his head turned away, as if he despised them.

J could see the walls of the original fort, still manned, with cannon at the ready; but the houses of the town had sprawled beyond their narrow compass and the fort served only as the end point of what would have been, in England, a little market town. The handsomest, biggest houses were stone built, in a row, in a style that would not have disgraced London, and behind them and to the side of them was a range of styles from frame buildings half completed, to little wattle-and-daub shanties. Mostly they were built of wood, planks of untreated crudely sawn boards overlaid one across the other, roofed with mats of badly thatched straw.

No gardens, J noted at once. But everywhere, in every patch of ground, at every corner, even lining the roadside, were tall ungainly plants with leaves broad and flat like those of tulips, flopping over.

“What plant is that?” J asked a man who was pushing up the gangplank to greet a newcomer.

He hardly glanced over his shoulder. “Tobacco, of course,” he said. “You’ll learn to recognize it soon enough.”

J nodded. He had seen the plant before, but he had not thought they would grow it to the exclusion of everything else, in the very streets of their new city.

He took his bag and made his way down the gangplank to the crowded quayside.

“Is there an inn here?”

“A dozen,” a woman replied, “but only if you have gold or tobacco to pay.”

“I can pay,” J said steadily. “I come with a warrant from the king of England.”

She looked away as if she were not much impressed with his patent. “Then you had best tell the governor,” she said, nodding toward the man’s broad back, “if he’ll stoop to speak with you.”

J hefted his bag onto his other shoulder and stepped up toward the man. “Sir John?” he asked. “Let me introduce myself. I am John Tradescant the younger, gardener to the king. He has commanded me to make a collection of rare plants, and rarities of all sorts. Here is his letter.” He bowed and produced the patent marked with the royal seal.

Sir John did not take it. He merely nodded his head in reply. “What’s your title?”

“Esquire,” J said, still uncomfortable with the lie which claimed his right to be a gentleman when he was in truth nothing more than the son of a working man and the grandson of a laborer.

The governor turned and extended his hand. J shook the proffered two fingers. “Call tomorrow,” the governor said. “I have to collect my letters and some bills of purchase from the captain here. Call tomorrow and I shall be at leisure to receive you.”

“Then I’ll find a bed at an inn,” J said uncertainly.

The governor had already turned his back. “Do that. Or the people are extraordinarily hospitable.”

J waited in case he would offer anything more; but he moved away and there was nothing for J to do but pick up his other bulkier bag, which had been slung down on the quayside, and trudge up the hill, past the bulging walls of the fort, toward the little town.

He found the first inn by the haunting smell of stale ale. As he paused in the doorway there was a loud baying noise of a big dog and a shrill shout commanding it to be silent. J tapped lightly on the door and stepped in.

It was dark inside; the air was thick with smoke, almost unbreathable for a stranger. J’s eyes stung and he felt his breath catch.

“Good day,” a woman said abruptly from the back of the room. J blinked tears from his eyes and saw her better: a woman of about fifty with the leathery skin and hard eyes of a survivor. She wore rough wooden clogs on her feet, a homespun skirt kilted up out of the way, a shirt that had once belonged to a man twice her size and a shawl tied tightly around her shoulders.

“I’m new come from London,” J said. “I want a room for the night.”

“You can’t have one to yourself – you’re not at Whitehall now.”

“No,” J said politely. “Might I share a room?”

“You’ll share a bed and like it!”

“Very well,” J said. “And something to eat? And drink?”

She nodded. “Paying in gold? Or tobacco?”

“Where would I get tobacco?” J demanded, his irritation finally breaking through. “I landed five minutes ago.”

She smiled, as if she were pleased to see him rise to the bait. “How would I know?” she demanded. “Maybe you’d had the sense to ask in London how we do things over here. Maybe you’d had the sense to buy some on the quayside, seeing as every planter in the colony was selling there today. Maybe you’re a returning planter coming back to your rich fields. How would I know?”

“I’m not a planter, and I was not advised to bring tobacco to Virginia,” J said. “But I am hungry and thirsty and weary. I should like a wash too. When will my dinner be ready?”

The woman abandoned her teasing of him abruptly. “You can wash under the pump in the yard,” she said. “Don’t drink the water – it’s only a shallow well and it’s foul. You’ll sleep in the attic along with the rest of us. You’ll share a pallet bed with my son or with whoever next comes through the door. Dinner will be ready as soon as it’s cooked, which will be the quicker if I can get on now.”

She turned her back to him and stirred something in a pot hanging over the fireplace. Then she moved to a barrel in the corner and drew him a mug of ale.

“Here,” she said. “Four mugs for a penny. I’ll keep the tally.”

“I’m sure you will,” J said under his breath and went out into the yard to wash.

She need not have warned him not to drink the water. It came out of the pump in a brown brackish spout, stinking horribly. Still, it was better than seawater, and J stripped and washed all over, and then pulled on his breeches and sat himself down on a pile of sawn wood and shaved himself, feeling his skin with his fingertips to guide his razor.

The ground still heaved uneasily under his feet, as if he were on board ship. But he knew that his father had felt the same when they had made landfall at Rhé or in Russia after his long voyage across the North Sea. He had told him that it was the same after any long voyage. For a moment J thought of his father at home, and the two children. For a moment he had the sweetest of illusions that Jane was there too, caring for them, awaiting his return. It seemed so much more likely that she would be there, waiting for him, than that she should be dead and he never see her again. The moment was so strong that he had to remind himself of the orangery and the pallet bed, and her white-faced determination that she should die alone rather than pass the plague to him and to her children. The thought of it made him sick to the stomach with grief, and he dropped his head in his hands as the cool Virginia twilight wrapped him in darkness, and he knew that he had sailed to the new world, to the new land, but brought his three-year-old grief all that long way with him.